Why do people take down their entire website when they want to do an upgrade?

[Kelemvor]

There are so many times I've gone to a website and have bene presented with a "Sorry, we're updating but come back later to see the Brand New Site".

Why the hell don't people work on the redesign in some sort of test folder or something? It doesn't make much sense to compelte take your whole site down and piss off your potential customers when all you have to do is make the new site in some other folder or something.

Man that's just annoying that companies can be so dumb.

 

[kritical]

It isn't that simple. Most e-commerce websites arent driven by just "folders" as you may thing and then just uploaded. Theres a lot more to it. It isn't like your basic personal homepage buddy...

 

[Jzero]

My company does not have downtime between redesigns. The new site is developed in a test environment with a test backend that mirrors the production environment. When it is time to roll out, the new environment becomes the production site and the old production site is used for the next development cycle.

There is little downtime. We can't afford it!

 

[Chiropteran]

Because they hire the cheapest people they can find?

 

[benliong]

kritical is right. I am in charged of a database-driven e-commerce website, and we normally do indeed design the new site at the back-end. But eventually the new site has to be integrated with the old databse. That's when you really have to test it at the real site and put some kind of IP filter so other people don't see the test site.

Of course there are better ways to do it but this is the most convenient, especially for company with only 1-2 IT guys around.

 

[Kelemvor]

I'm not really talking about huge ecommerce sites. Mainly just general informative sites. That's why there have Test Environments, Production Environments, etc.